Russell Poole, UK general manager, Equinix asks whether it is time to outsource

There’s no doubt that data centre outsourcing is becoming an increasingly attractive option for businesses of all sizes. Whether large or small, many organisations do not want to commit to the significant financial investment that an on-premise data centre demands. Neither are they likely to have the resources and expertise required to build and manage their own facilities.

What’s more, the current economic condition means enterprises must reduce their IT spend whilst simultaneously improving, streamlining and modernising their infrastructures. This cost equation is driving more and more organisations to choose high-performance, outsourced data centres over the riskier in-house option, which is riddled with management, cost-control and refresh challenges. In doing so, there are significant benefits to be had in terms of scalability, neutrality, power and reliability.

Room for growth
While organisations design and build data centres to achieve specific business results, Gartner Group estimates that one third of organisations with their own private facilities do not use this capacity to its full potential . Conversely, lack of capacity also threatens business operations, and can have a devastating impact on overall revenue and profitability.

As an alternative, most data centre outsourcers offer a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ solution, enabling enterprises to flexibly scale up or down as required, or to cost-effectively meet brief, unexpected surges in demand. In addition, businesses outsourcing their data centre operations need not worry about essential set-up expenses, for example, staffing costs, which account for up to 40 per cent of data centre-related costs. They also avoid substantial security costs, and the expense of enforcing best practice policies.

Large-scale, optimally designed facilities offer further advantages still. Specialist data centre providers offering purpose-built facilities with leading-class specifications deliver obvious benefits to businesses. Proximity to high-speed communication links, access to a wide range of carriers, and flexible network architecture are just a few of the drivers of this upward trend.

Staying neutral
In addition to offering outsourced colocation space, carrier-neutral data centre providers also offer internet exchange points, enabling ISPs and network operators to improve their connectivity services by peering with each other. Not only does this help achieve better network efficiency, it also lowers overall IP transit costs.

Within these data centres, it is possible for organisations to form peering relationships with, and direct connections to, multiple operators. Customers can also monitor performance and traffic metrics on a per-peer basis across multiple locations. This carrier-neutral approach can greatly enhance the speed and reliability of internet traffic, resulting in faster response times and a better end-user experience. Some data centres further augment interconnection and secure colocation services by integrating carrier Ethernet exchange points into their facilities, providing customers with a wide choice of destinations and diverse connectivity options for Ethernet services.

The power of a reliable data centre
It’s clear that outsourced data centres provide customers with economies of scale, better connectivity options and future-proofed technology, but perhaps the chief benefit is power.

Many organisations with in-house data centres often struggle to meet the facility’s need for power. Indeed, according to Nemertes Research, the main reason cited by companies for building a new data centre is that the old one lacked sufficient power, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) density. Too many organisations neglect to factor in the cost of insufficient power, with every hour of system downtime resulting in losses of thousands of pounds in sales revenues and employee productivity.

Outsourcers, however, have significant incentives, enforced by service-level agreements, to ensure that power outages never come to pass. Their ability to attract and retain customers essentially relies on offering more competitively priced power services than in-house centres, and ensuring that they provide redundancy for primary power provision, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and environmental control systems, to eliminate any potential points of failure.

Key considerations
There are clearly many compelling reasons to outsource. When evaluating the options, organisations should not only weigh the total cost of ownership in terms of operating expenses, but also opportunity costs. With high performance colocation, sufficient power density, a global footprint that minimises latency, and network-neutrality, enterprises benefit not just from cheaper operating costs, but also from their improved access to a competitive marketplace of resilient network services.